Lelyveld misleads further on the issue of confiscation. Here, from Carter’s book, is Lelyveld’s evidence that Israeli authorities “closely emulate” the South African regime:
Later I received a briefing from Meron Benvenisti….With maps and charts, he explained that the Israelis acquired Palestinian lands in a number of different ways: by direct purchase; through seizure “for security purposes for the duration of the occupation”; by claiming state control of areas formerly held by the Jordanian government; by “taking” under some carefully selected Arabic customs or ancient laws; and by claiming as state land all that was not cultivated or specifically registered as owned by a Palestinian family.
So Lelyveld’s evidence that Israel “confiscates” land in a manner similar to apartheid South Africa includes the fact that Israelis purchased land and retained Jordanian, British and Ottoman law relating to West Bank land as per Israel’s obligations under international law.
Details aside, the article has it backward on the most basic of levels. Blacks were forcibly removed from their homes so that a region could be exclusively white. If there is any parallel in the West Bank, it is in the Palestinian insistence that their future state be Judenrein, despite Jewish historic, cultural and religious ties to the land. (Lelyveld apparently has no problem with the ethnic cleansing of Jews from land on which they have lived for millennia.)
Elaborating on “other similarities [to apartheid] of which Carter seems to be unaware,” Lelyveld asserts: “Israel has proven that it’s not at all dependent on imported cheap labor from the territories, that it can get along just fine with Thais, Filipinos, and Romanians. It has thus gone beyond South Africa’s apartheid theorists who dreamed of a day when they could do without black labor but never got close.”
The argument absurdly conflates race with citizenship, and racism with security. Arab citizens of Israel can, and of course do, work in the country, often alongside Jewish workers. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, however, are not citizens of Israel but rather residents of an area from which a brutal war against Israeli civilians was launched only a few years ago. It was as a result of this war that the number of Palestinians working inside Israel was reduced. One can call Israelis’ apparent preference to hire workers from countries with peaceful relations many things, but a parallel to apartheid it is not.
More evidence of Israel’s supposed similarity to apartheid South Africa can be seen, according to Lelyveld, in the fact that “there’s a much bigger and more obvious military presence in the occupied territories than normally existed in the black townships and ‘homelands’ of the apartheid state.” By that logic, the U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II were also like apartheid with their vast armaments, bases and manpower.
Lelyveld also repeats the discredited canard about a supposed “network of roads for the exclusive use of the [West Bank Jewish] settlers and the Israel Defense Forces” and mischaracterizes United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, saying that it calls for an Israeli withdrawal from “the territories.”
The latter statement is a particularly striking error, since he is well aware that the resolution makes no such call. During Lelyveld’s tenure at The New York Times, the newspaper on three separate occasions incorrectly described Resolution 242 as calling for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines. Each time, the errors were acknowledged with corrections, such as the one published on September 8, 2000:
An article on Wednesday about the Middle East peace talks referred incorrectly to United Nations resolutions on the Arab-Israeli conflict. While Security Council Resolution 242, passed after the 1967 Middle East War, calls for Israel’s armed forces to withdraw “from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” no resolution calls for Israeli withdrawal from all territory, including East Jerusalem, occupied in the war.
It is precisely because 242’s drafters did not believe Israel should withdraw to the precarious 1949 lines that they insisted the resolution call for an Israeli withdrawal “from territories” rather than “from the territories” or from “all the” territories.
Lelyveld clearly understood the content and meaning of Resolution 242, and clearly understood that by repeatedly getting it wrong The New York Times was harming its own credibility. After the third correction, he convened his staff and said to them: “Three times in recent months we’ve had to run corrections on the actual provisions of UN Resolution 242, providing great cheer and sustenance to those readers who are convinced we are opinionated and not well informed on Middle East issues.”